


Reign

by Dangereuse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Royalty, Alternate Universe-Magic but not HP Magic, Briefly mentioned and entirely non-graphic animal death, Harry getting his comuppance against the Dursleys, He hasn't had a soft feeling for many years, M/M, Prince Tom and his Gigantic Crush on Lord Harry, Tom being an unrepentant bastard and manipulator, Tom is Younger this Time, Tom is pretty murderous, Tom's hobby is bone cleaning and assembly, nothing happens until Tom is reasonably man shaped (16)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:27:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25718803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dangereuse/pseuds/Dangereuse
Summary: Prince Tom has been in love with Harry, Lord Potter ever since he was ten and Potter was sixteen.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 10
Kudos: 170





	Reign

Tom first met Lord Potter at court, when he was ten and Potter was sixteen. He was sitting as still as he could, in his best robes, trying to ensure that Morfin didn’t notice him wriggle and punish him by springing a puss-spouting curse from his defenseless nose. He was still too young for great-grandfather to have him tutored, a year away from the commissioning of his sword, and what magic he knew would earn him the unfortunate scrutiny of his grandfather, and worse, great-grandfather, King Salazar.

Potter came with his new guardian, Lord Black. He was dressed fine enough, although a little thin and disheveled looking—stupid, as they had been allowed time to clean up upon arriving—and, unfortunately for Tom, Potter was very pretty. His gold skin, high cheekbones and striking green eyes made for a memorable sight. Tom despised him for it immediately.

At first Potter stared at the high sky-filled ceilings of the receiving chamber like a rube, before Lord Black not-so-gently knocked him with an elbow to draw his attention to the king. Harry took the blow well; straightening up and doing a very shoddy impression of a high-court noble.

Tom dismissed him in favor of Black, who was just as pretty, and, judging by court gossip, hopefully more interesting. The last four years had been an abundance of juicy rumor ever since he’d come back from a twelve-year imprisonment that had started as a kidnap-for-ransom his family refused to pay, after purportedly seducing one of his Wolfkin captors and killing the rest. He looked slightly unhinged, grey eyes like little miniature storms in his face, and looked as vaguely disheveled as Potter, although he wore it much better. Where Potter couldn’t bother to comb the morass of glossy black curls on his head, Black’s hair looked as if he’d just climbed out of a boudoir and was impatiently waiting to fall back in one. He frankly looked as crazy as his cousin Bellatrix, who also was a great source of amusement for Tom on court-days, and he thought the day might be looking slightly up as far as entertainment value. A good distraction for Morfin, at the very least.

Black and Potter did the expected: bowing while Tom’s great-grandfather looked as bored as usual. “What do my subjects tire me with today?” He drawled out. 

Lord Black didn’t look offended; he just grinned wide and bright and cuffed Potter on the back of the neck before lightly shaking him like a crup pup. “We’d like to humbly beg forgiveness for striking against the squatting Dursleys, to inform our king that Harry Potter has taken his rightful seat on his ancestral lands, and to ask what bribe your majesty requires that he would reaffirm Harry’s title and claim.”

Harry made a wounded sound, like he couldn’t quite believe Black’s gall. Tom couldn’t quite either.

The room was quiet.

“Are they dead?” The King asked, finally looking interested. He was leaning forward in his seat. “That dreadful idiot and his fascination with croquet jokes?”

“Quite.” Black stated. His grin was a little bloodthirsty.

King Salazar let out a delighted little laugh. It made the hairs on the Tom’s neck stand straight up. He could see Morfin flinch on his great-grandfather’s other side. “Delightful! Was it you?”

Black shook his head, and shook Potter-the-crup-pup again. “Harry’s quite the duelist!” Black proclaimed. “Just like his father.”

King Salazar made a little face at that. “Duelist perhaps, but a boor indeed. Although I almost tolerated the mother, I think. She was clever. There’s a dearth of clever people around here.” Tom’s great-grandfather took a break to glare around the room, before the full force of it landed on Marvolo. “I almost didn’t let her wed. But she bribed me with quite the clever enchantment, if I recall. Charmed a moat full of lily pads to transfigure into some sort of flesh-eating fish, when one tried to cross. Are you clever?” He asked Potter.

“Er, eh, I do alright? Your majesty?”

King Salazar sniffed. “So no.” He turned back to Black. “I’ll deal with you then.” He stood, and the whole court did too, startled by his sudden movement. “Merope’s get, where are you?”

Tom jolted, distracted from the show. He bowed his best bow, the one that made the front curl of his hair dip jauntily onto his forehead. He'd practiced it. “Your Majesty.”

King Salazar waved his hand without even looking at him. “Take Potter somewhere. Do something with him. Don’t bother boring me with the details of it. Black, with me.”

Tom bowed again. “Yes, your majesty.”

Potter smiled at him, sort of shell-shocked, but followed obediently enough. Tom seethed.

***

After some careful and not so careful consideration of the circumstances, Tom thought he should at least get some experimental labor out of the poor idiot he was saddled with for today. Recover at least some of the amusement he’d lost at court, forced as he was to be Potter’s chaperone.

He led Potter to his secret workspace. Using some rune books he’d stolen from his late mother’s belongings, he managed to create a spell working around the seldom used tack shed for one of the satellite families’ stables. It basically hid the entrance to anyone Tom didn’t want mucking around in his private workspace. Which was everyone.

Except for Potter, today. Tom was wondering if the boy was gullible enough to fall for some of the cookies he’d dosed to return the nose-spewing pus that Morfin weaponized so frequently. He eyed Harry from the corner of his eye. Perhaps. He seemed…naïve.

“Here,” Tom gestured, at his work shed. He did a little perfunctory flourish in an effort to practice his mannerisms in front of an audience, before he showed them at court. “This is my space.”

Harry’s eyes widened. “You have your own personal space? That’s nice.” Tom studied him from the corner of his eye, but he seemed…sincere. He didn’t reply, merely striding forward. In his head, he was already running calculations on the potion concentration per cookie.

Harry moved to come in, before he stopped, gawking in the doorway. His eyes had been wide before, but now they were saucers.

Tom groaned. If he’d been any younger, he would have put his head in his hands. His workspace. That he had claimed. Because the servants all screamed and cried at all of his experiments. Tom revised his thoughts on tricking Potter into eating his experiments Vanished. There was no concievable way he could dupe him now. No one was that much of an idiot.

“Did you make that?” Potter breathed out, eyes wide.

Tom straightened his shoulders and whirled around with his best threatening scowl on his face. “Why, yes. I did.” He tossed his head like one of the ladies he admired at court, and affected a nonchalant air, like he couldn’t foresee the crash and burn of this entire encounter. Tom was actually vaguely surprised Potter hadn’t run yet.

Then:

“That’s bloody marvelous!” The older boy enthused. He took an awed breath. “Look at them!” He did a small twirl, then carefully reached forward, his hands soft as clouds, as pillows, as _love_ , and touched the small assembled remains of the mouse carcass Tom had painstakingly glued together. He tensed, reflexively. The mouse had so many bones, so small and so delicate, and Tom had seen his careful anatomical creations smashed like so much refuse before.

“They’re sharp,” Harry breathed, and retracted his finger. “How did you get them assembled so perfectly?” His eyes were wide and awe-bright, and he still managed to turn to Tom for a brief moment, before his gaze was drawn to the other assembled animals.

“I boiled the dead carcass until all the flesh sloughed off and the bones were white as salt.” Tom said, voice dead, as he stared straight into the boy’s bright green eyes. “Then I glued them together with a paste formed from the dissolved ligaments.”

Harry paused. Then blurted, “I didn’t even know you could do that!” His delicate touch was straying now to a small foal that Tom had recovered when it died a few hours after birth. Harry stroked the horse’s forelock like it was a living being. He carefully stepped around the animal. He laid another light caress down the length of a rib, and then laid a gentle pat on the hip bone. “This is really awesome.”

Tom found his normally pale cheeks…blushing. “Sometimes,” he offered, all of a sudden feeling like his throat was tight. “I have to use spell castings of the animals. To put the bones in the right places.”

Harry nodded, still awed, like it wasn’t a failing of Tom’s memory to accurately piece together these skeletons.

Tom had to reconsider his thoughts of Harry. Harry was kind and nice and full of smiles, and full of compliments, clever enough to follow along with Tom’s experiments, and when he did reach for one of the cookies, arrayed artfully on the desk, Tom told him no, that those were for Morfin. And Harry just nodded and stopped.

***

Two weeks after meeting Harry, Tom received a special package in the mail. It was probably the first unsolicited piece of post he had ever received, and when an owl gently laid it down in front of him, he blinked for a good three minutes. He pressed a curse-detecting amulet to the parcel, and when that came up empty, used a small amount of a poison detecting powder he’d been beaten for pinching off of Morfin. He had to bully one of his tutors into unshrinking the package for him with a small runic array, and when he did, Tom could barely breathe from delight.

It was an inauspicious gift at first glance. Just a simple glass tank, warded against breaks and imbued with the array for featherlightness. Just a simple glass tank—with beautiful, glossy, precious, _irreplaceable_ beetles in it.

The beetles would consume flesh, and made the preparation of skeletons easier. They were faster, cleaner, and most importantly, less aromatic than Tom’s method of boiling. Tom couldn’t wait to try them; one of the servants had been poisoning his laundry, slowly, on the orders of Marvolo. Tom was keen to expand his studies and see human remains revealed in all their detail.

Harry’s handwriting was poor, and the choice of bottle green ink was strange, but Tom could only sigh at the note and compare the color unfavorably to Harry’s eyes. Tom had been hoping to import some, after he stole enough money to justify the expense. He had no allowance, isolated as he was from the family with his mother dead and his entire paternal family's line executed for treason.

_I heard that using these kinds of beetles are good for your hobby. Cheers, Harry,_ was all the piece of paper said.

Tom kept the note dearer than the bugs.

***

Having a crush on Harry Potter was both the worst thing and the best thing that happened to Tom.

Harry was… kind. Harry was a newly minted lord, thanks to the clever and brash maneuvering of his guardian, Lord Black, but every now and then he was grouped with the younger children, the heirs and spares, being by far the youngest. He never let on the slight bothered him.

He never tolerated with the other heirs would laugh and jeer at Tom. He invariably had a kind thing to say. He always remembered what Tom was working on.

Harry also seemed genuinely excited by…excitement. Harry had seen Harry dismiss a runic array theory blithely as too dry one moment, and then stop and genuinely listen and appreciate Tom talking for a whole hour on the topic. Nothing was barred as long as Tom was genuinely enthused, and Harry would try his best to form some sort of idea or opinion on the subject. Harry always made time to listen to him speak.

When Tom awkwardly approached him for a turn at a dance for his first ball, Harry had simply chuckled his gay, in love with life laugh, and accompanied him around for three whole turns on the dance floor, giving his attention for at least a whole half hour, cementing Tom’s new reputation as a desirable and sought after party companion, even though he didn’t prefer to dance. 

Harry grew more and more handsome, although not any taller. He was an _excellent_ duellist, Black’s praise had not lied in the least. Tom watched him hungrily until his own sword was forged, and then sought him out for his own match.

Harry thrilled at dueling, no matter whether a friendly spar or a bloody fight of honor. Tom had been privileged enough to see one of the Dursleys coarse friends seek recompense for their supplanting. Harry annihilated him. His cheeks had gotten a bit rosy, from the excitement if not the exertion, and the dull idiot had ended up tithing to Harry a tidy sum for the next seven years.

But Harry was too kind. He had time for everybody. Especially the Weasleys. The Lovegoods. And Minister Dumbledore. Those pathetic imbeciles had stood aside when the last head of the Noble House of Potter was supposed by those thirsty, grasping Dursleys, when he had been all but imprisoned and used as a slave in the holdings he rightfully owned, but now flocked to Harry in droves. It was sickening.

Perhaps worst of all, Harry was older; he made no secret that he longed for a family. After all, his had been taken from him. Tom watched the covetous eyes of the social-climbing Weasleys, the transparent ploys of the youngest Vane, even the considering eyes of the foreign Delacours.

Harry was looking to marry, and Tom was _furious_.

***

When Tom was sixteen, he was summoned to his first ever personal audience with his great-grandfather. It was a nerve-wracking summons. Tom didn't even think he'd been properly presented at his birth, and his place in the line of succession was only secured by a decree Tom believed King Salazar had only insouciantly signed when the requisition funds for his sword had been offered. He didn't know what to expect. When Morfin was so unlucky, he often came back aching from some torture spell or other his great-grandfather had been trying out. 

“Good,” Slytherin didn’t even look up when Tom politely knocked into the doorway. He was old, older than Minister of State Dumbledore, even, but he didn’t look it. Some Dark Art had frozen him in his late forties, and Tom was certainly going to figure out how the old man had done it, before he fell to the same strictures of age. “Tom. Come in, sit down.”

Tom knew better than to keep the King waiting. He folded himself into the chair across from Slytherin. The King was the only person in the castle Tom had to work to keep eye contact with. Eventually, Tom found himself looking away. The King huffed, and then waved his hand. The teapot poured them two cups.

“Now, Tom. Do you know why you are here?” Slytherin asked.

“No sir,” Tom forced himself to say, evenly. His great-grandfather didn’t often dare cast his gaze down at his descendants—all utter disappointments to his line. He kept his time with ruling, and the projects up in his tower: sometimes they caused the sun to darken for three days or generated horrible storms that hit neighboring kingdoms and forced them to dock (at the nearest Slytherin port). Tom couldn’t force more eye contact just yet, but he stared very conscientiously at Slytherin’s cheekbones to create the appearance of it.

Slytherin laughed, a short bark that made Tom flinch. “No, I suppose that tactic won’t work on you. Cleverest of our line since my poor late wife whelped that idiot Marvolo. No. You’re too smart to just confess to all that nasty business you’ve got going on in the tack shed of stable five.”

Tom forced himself not to move, he just stared blandly at his great-grandfather. What shed?

Slytherin let out another bark of laughter, and leaned forward. “Get yourself a proper workshop, boy.” He laughed again, to himself. “Anyway. That’s not why you’re here.” Slytherin took a sip of his tea. “You’re here because I’ve finally learned my lesson.”

Tom couldn’t help but lean forward a bit. What _lesson_ could his great-grandfather have possibly learnt? That he thought important enough to impart?

“Our line has always been… _particular_ in matters of the heart. My worthless lump of a son Marvolo seduced a poor Hufflepuff girl much too young for him and got us embroiled in a war I had to settle with three estates and a chalet. Morfin killed the poor bint I made him marry in a record four days. And your mother! Girl could barely stand in my presence without pissing herself but as soon as I tell her she can’t have that poor Riddle boy she somehow gets up the gumption to have his fiancée executed and bewitches him into knocking her up!” Marvolo shook his head. “I regretted having to execute him. Poor boy didn’t know up from down anymore when I caught up to her.” Slytherin shook his head, considered Tom. “At least you got his face. I didn’t think anything could breed beauty into our line.”

Slytherin sighed, and placed his tea cup back on the saucer. His voice was resigned when he continued: “My own love I kept in my tower for forty years after we were forbidden to wed, until he bit his own tongue clean off in a bid to be free.” Slytherin laced his long, spider-like fingers, so like Tom’s own, over his knee. They were the only physical trait that Tom had inherited from his mother’s side of the family and in certain ways he was grateful. “I’ve learnt my lesson. If your brainless twit of a mother could muck up things so stellarly, there’s no saying what _you’ll_ manage, clever as you are. So,” he clapped. “It’s time for you to marry. Who will you have?”

Tom nearly hovered out of his chair, all of his plans to woo Potter sparking behind his eyes in corona of color. Could he place away all his careful maneuverings, and just reach out and _have_? Could it be that easy? Then Tom paused, considering. Was this some trick, some maneuver to bring him low? He had often battled for position with Morfin, back when Tom’s plebian name and pretty face combined with his bastard status made him seem weak in the court’s standing, before Morfin had learned he didn’t have the mettle to tangle with Tom. But Slytherin himself didn’t take part in those maneuverings. He was the undisputed top and the court knew it. It was frankly humorous to imagine Morfin trying to take Slytherin down, but would Slytherin want to tangle with him? To test him? To show him how outclassed he would be? To see if he was clever? Tom studied him. Slytherin only grabbed a biscuit, looked at it, and then chucked onto the floor. It shattered in several pieces, and Tom didn’t even blink as a small shard pattered off of his robes.

“You’re right to be suspicious, in this family,” Slytherin stated, animatedly peering at another biscuit and apparently finding the same flaw, for it made the same fate as it’s brother, thankfully without the attendant crumb splash. “But let us be frank, for once, son of my granddaughter. Marvolo and Merope have passed, and Morfin is an imbecile. I can’t stand anyone long enough to fuck them. Who else will take my mantle?”

Tom met Slytherin’s eyes again, longer this time. Slytherin smiled around the edges of his cruel mouth. “Yes?”

“I want Potter. Harry Potter.” Tom nearly squirmed in his excitement, but he buried it down and forced his voice not to break.

Slytherin leaned back in his chair, considering. “You’re sure? He’s a bit older than you. Pretty, I suppose, and clever enough. But that Malfoy heir is said to be prettier. And that Granger girl is no doubt cleverer.” Tom shook his head before he could finish claiming that _Malfoy_ could be prettier than Harry. Sure Granger was smarter, but Harry was _Harry_.

“I want Harry Potter,” Tom breathed out.

Slytherin smiled, and it was ugly. “Ah. It’s like that.” Slytherin leaned forward, poured himself a fresh cup of tea, and ignored Tom’s untouched cup on the silver tray. “Harry Potter.” Slytherin ran his mouth over the words, as if testing how they fit into his mouth. He took a long sip of tea, and leaned back so far in his chair that he was staring at the ceiling. “Let’s see. He’s meant to be his own family head, I believe. It’ll make him harder to wife.”

“Yes, but his parents are dead, as is his Guardian, Sirius Black, as of last year. He’s ripe for being enfolded into a more dominant family as there’s no one to stand against—"

Slytherin raised a hand. Tom paused.

“Did you kill him?”

“Black?” Tom hesitated, and considered his great-grandfather once more. “I arranged it. Family duel. Bellatrix was enraged Sirius would dare to marry the foreign wolfkin knight, Lupin, and sully their family line. Sirius wanted to move with Harry to some properties the Blacks hold in Beauxbatons. They’ve better relations with their wolfkin neighbors.” Tom made a fist, realized it, and forced himself to relax. “It was an obviously unacceptable move.” He stated, perfectly evenly.

Slytherin laughed, dryly. He pinched the bridge of his large nose, still staring at the ceiling. He laughed again. “Thank Merlin I learned.” He took a deep breath. “Anything else?”

“There’s rumor he might contract to either of the youngest Weasleys,” Tom said, in the interest of full disclosure. “He was fostered there briefly in his youth.”

Slytherin made a face. “Don’t kill them. Weddings are dreadful when the bride is crying. I’ll see what I can do.” 

***

The banns for Tom Marvolo Riddle, Prince of the Realm, and Lord Potter-Black were read two weeks later.


End file.
